Goodbye, Good Parents--Final Blog Post

Dearest Parents of my dearest Students,

It is with a heavy heart and a firm sense of hope for the future that I bid University School of Nashville goodbye. Last week, I was interviewed for and accepted a position with Metro Nashville Public Schools to join a small team of educators who will craft the new Metro Nashville Virtual School into a model of its kind. Over the coming years, tens of thousands of children who for whatever reason cannot or will not attend a traditional school for a traditional learning experience will have an opportunity to become excited about learning, to learn, and to earn a high school diploma through our efforts.

Accepting the job, the "call" really, was not an easy decision. Most of all I will miss the daily interaction with your children. Over the last decade and a half, they have been at the center of my personal fulfillment, joyfully filling my days with challenges and successes. The announced plan for filling my position is to hire a capable substitute to work in the lab until a capable full-time replacement can be found.

Appropriately, this will be the final post at this blog. Whether my replacement will choose to communicate in this manner is anybody's guess. I plan to leave it up as a resource for her or him and an archive and resource for anyone in the world. That's the way the world works now, and I do hope it's helpful in some way.

If you wish to keep up with our progress in MNPS, I'll be posting, of course at http://scottmerrick.net and I will be setting up new channels of communication on the internet. I'm on Twitter and Facebook as well, and  feel free to friend/follow me there.

I wish you and your children all the best, and I leave them in the care of some of the most dedicated and capable educators I know. I'll be around, of course, only not as much. If you are in the neighborhood of the Martin Professional Development Center on Fairfax Avenue, next to Dragon Park, please feel welcome to drop in to say hi.

I just got word from NAIS that I'll still be welcome in their "Teacher of the Future" cohort for the year 2010-2011, so I'll be contributing to the resources there over the coming year as well.

Take care, and as I always told your children, "be good and have fun."

Sincerely,
Scott Merrick
Virtual Learning Curriculum Specialist,
Metro Nashville Public Schools
scott@scottmerrick.net

Week of April 5, 2010

The Short Story:

4th grade-Quest Atlantis

3rd grade-K4K

Kindergarten -Boowa and Kwala MyFirstClicks center number 22, Vegetables and the Garden

1st grade-Fairytales websites on Webliographer

2nd grade-My Lemonade Stand intro (Pitt business cards)

The Long Story:

4th grade-4th graders Quest the light Atlantis! Continuing to move into and along through the winding time-traveling mission of Mesa Verde, we find that we can help Lorisa, the girl who is hiding from wrongly judgmental classmates on a field trip to Mesa Verde National Park by going back and forth into three periods of history and talking to Puebloan culture denizens, all along the way learning more and more about their rich and fascinating culture. I took a few pics of my own as I pursued the mission over the weekend and I'll add a couple here:

In this first one, chestertesterusn, my student avatar, is viewing a video about the Puebloan culture inside the museum. Later on, he'll have the chance to pursue a detailed scavenger hunt by investigating the displays in the museum, like the one at the wall in the right hand side of this picture.

In the second picture, you can see the first questions of the scavenger hunt itself. You'll note that these questions reflect knowledge about details key to understanding this very interesting lost culture. Part of one class session has been dedicated to demonstrating how to facilitate the taking of this little "test" by minimizing the window rather than closing it and reopening it as answers become clear. Stay tuned for more info as more and more Questers progress into this fantastic educational unit!

3rd grade-Keyboarding for Kids proceeds apace. I'm feeling better all the time as at least several students in each classroom pass the 20 lesson mark toward completing the program. Whether any of them will actually finish all 64 lessons before the end of the year (when it is optional, not required) remains to be seen, but I have high hopes that at least a few of them will. Parents, if you have not yet bought into this valuable learning opportunity for your child, help them out by encouraging them to make progress and to make it the right way, with HOME ROW KEY POSITION, ALWAYS!

Kindergarten -K kiddos will visit Boowa and Kwala MyFirstClicks center number 22 this week, "Vegetables and the Garden." This is a review lesson in the 50 lesson continuum that was introduced the second week of school, and the gentle, satire-free activities encourage the use of mouse control, arrow keys, and more for their completion.

1st grade-The 1sters visit Fairy Tales websites on Webliographer. They've been exploring fairy tales in the classroom, but they may not have visited the ubercool Grimm Fairy Tales site or the gently fun Snapdragon version of Goldilocks.

2nd grade-My Lemonade Stand is an out-of-print software version of a classic, but it's so well done that we keep using it year to year. In it, a budding business boy or girl has 30 days to make (or lose) a fortune, beginning with a budget of a mere $2.00 and deciding quantity, price, and whether or not to even sell each day based on the weather "Forcast" (even good game programmers can misspell things--and you'd better bet I point that error out each time I introduce the game). The forecast includes High Temperature, Humidity, and Percent chance of Rain, also all good concepts to reinforce, and a skillful (and lucky) player can amass wealth well into the thousands in the 20 or 30 minutes it can take to work through the 30 days of business. Ms. Pitt's ready to do her class's business cards, so we'll do that this week. More on that project next week, when we'll all get it done...

See you then!

Oh, and here are the K-1st grade Spring pictures I promised last week--all in a slideshow for your joyful Springtime viewing!

Marchin' On through 2009!

Well, well, well, here we are in March! Where has most of the school year gone!?

It's a good thing we have most of the rest of March, and April, and May to continue working because we are going to need it!

Let's go in order of coming into the lab, starting with our 3rd graders:

We finished up our three weeks in the award-winning program "Timez Attack" this week. I'll be rolling around the room later today on my little office chair, going from computer to computer to computer recording the student progress. My intention is to make a case for purchasing the full-fledged program for next year, so that all the exciting levels of work are unlocked for the students. Should I be successful we'll buy the Timez Attack upgrade and the 3rd and 4th graders (and those 2nd graders who may need extra advanced practice, just another available tool for individualized instruction) will have access to them! I note that several students' parents have already purchased the program for home, and that is heartening--I don't recommend home purchase, partly because I don't want to be viewed as endorsing a commercial product--but those decisions on the part of parents just justify my faith in the program!

4th graders continue questing! I am seeing the overall progress of my little n00bie questers begin to string out in a broader spectrum as some forge forward seemingly voraciously and some still languish in the early stages of introductory missions and quests. I'm getting around to the latter group individually to help them work through those areas where they are confused, and hopefully everyone will be on track soon. However, I have to share that the quality of the questing (in the form of written submitted "Responses" and "Reflections," two required features for quest completion) is VERY encouraging. For example, a recent response from one 4th grader came to me for review and I had to print it out to share with her teacher. I won't name her by name, but when asked to describe a personal occasion where she felt she'd been disrespected, here's what she wrote:

One time someone told me that I needed to dress better. I didn't get very upset,
but I wished that she hadn't said that. I told her that I didn't care what she
thought about my clothes and that she should stop being mean. I wish I hadn't
said that, either. I couldn't agree more with the saying 'treat others the way
you want to be treated.' To me, respect means to make sure that you don't take
anger out on anyone else. It aslo means to have a good attitude about what your
friends do or wear, even if you don't personally like it.

If you look at the goals for this quest, the student did a very good job of addressing them. Yesterday I reviewed and responded to over 25 mission/quest submissions, approving about half and asking others to resubmit after adding detail or correcting grammar or spelling. While I do not require perfection (note the "aslo" in the above submission), I do require attention to both!

Here are the goals, by the way--and please bear in mind this is only one introductory quest in a virtual world rich with opportunities to learn and reflect:

Having Respect
Your goal(s) are to:
Do you feel like there was a time when you felt someone didn't respect you? Was there a time when you didn't respect someone else? Share your views on respect.
Share a time when you were disrespected or you didn't respect someone else.
Then, describe how you would you like others to treat you.
Also, describe what it means to show respect.

I will report that managing this "classroom of 72" is a challenging load for me, as my QA mentor suggested it might be. However, I'm so encouraged by early performance that I persevere! This week one classroom was inworld during the regular 4th grade time and we found that bananausn (one of our quester users from USN) was also online. It turns out she was home with a case of pinkeye and via the magic of our virtual environment, we were all able to chat and explore together! Fun!

Revisit this blog for more on our journey into the fabulous learning experience of Quest Atlantis!

Kindergartners explored Lesson 24 at UpToTen.com (now up to this week, challenging their memory in four fun activities. Two of them are scaled to "Younger Kids" and "Older Kids" and I challenged all our "young kids" to pick the older option and share with me and the teacher assistant (when present) when they were successful. Beaming faces testified to their pride in being just that.

1st and 2nd graders are working at AAAMath.com to drill basic addition facts. It turns interesting and fun (and, yes, maybe a little bit competitive, but in a good way!) when we all go to the 0,1,2 Addition page and click "Give Me Time" to do a 60 second timed drill that allows the user more time as he or she completes the number sentences correctly. I like this drill site because it does not require young children to enter the numbers on the keypad, only to click on the correct answer button. I'm hoping that some of our children who are most in need for retention of addition facts 0-10 will benefit from the experience and re-visit the site frequently!

February Marches On!

Another big week in the lab, as:

Kinderkids explored lesson number 43 at UpToTen Premium@Schools, now up to 8,377 schools using it; and I have to brag again about our being school NUMERO UNO! This lesson contains four activities classified as "Advanced Mouse and Keyboard" work and the kids had great fun with them--filling a honeycomb with honey from flowers, helping a mole through a tunnel, mousing Zoombunny up into the air to collect acorns and carrots, and finally using keyboard arrows to play a very serviceable version of the old game Brickmaster called "Breaking Bricks." Click the pic above for a detailed descripton.

1st graders explored the Webliographer for resources I've stored there relating to Weather. Some particularly liked the 15 or 20 word "word searches" while others gravitated to the "Water Goes Around" construct-your-own water cycle activity.

2nd graders visited the Webliographer for Mystery links, and explored especially the Fin, Furr, and Feather Federal Bureau of Investigation.

3rd graders cracked open Timez Attack (free version) to take their little guy through a very very nice 3D environment picking up math facts along the way then demonstrating their retention of them by tossing them at a pretty scary ogre who their math releases from a secret door. When the ogre is conquered by the smarts of the player, he disappears into thin air (not "killed," I emphasize, because the next door will surely see him released again) and another door, containing another math fact, is sought. It's a fun, well conceived and expertly executed game, the free version of which (the only limitation is that there is only one environment option, and more can be purchased at the site; but I don't encourage that--to the maker's credit, new environments are not required for full functionality) is downloadable at the Webliographer's Downloads topic or by visiting the TimezAttack website. Parents, if you wonder about the value of playing games for learning, visit and view the excellent intro video at BigBrains.com.

And, ahem, speaking of games, we (4th graders and I) proceed apace into Quest Atlantis, learning more about the worlds in which we are increasingly engaged. My email 9within QA) to all of the kids this week encouraged them to seek a sense of balance by limiting game play on their own, balancing it with homework, family time, outside play, reading, and other ways to be entertained. Their enthusiasm is sooooo clearly present (I overgeneralize somewhat here--we still have some confusion and mixed reaction and we're working with that) and I'm glad for that, but the last thing anyone wants is for this engaging platform to dominate playtime inordinately. But I will argue to the wall that if there's "screentime" available and there's a choice between a DVR'd episode of iCarly or the Simpsons and Quest Atlantis and a child chooses the latter, a good choice has been made!

We're beginning to get into some missions and quests now, and in addition to the basic iBurst quest and Shardflower Social Commitments mission, the kids are unlocking some interesting things, such as fighting blights with magical critters and seeking out a playable giant piano to commit to Creativity. I'll soon have samples of writing so that you can begin to truly understand the power of this platform to motivate and inspire. I'm also beginning to take a little video of the action in the lab when the kids are all on at once. It's wild!

That's all for this week!

Quest Atlantis Apace, Math Arcade A-Go-Go, and Valentines Art Amazing

We are spending this week in various ways, and I'll dive right in, in the order in which the kids come in the lab each day:

3rd graders are finishing up their Master Artist poster projects, and they've been locating images with Google image search, always with the procedure in mind that in the event of inappropriate images they 1) close the window or turn off the monitor and 2) report it to a teacher (me, most likely, but their parents at home if that's where it happens). Copying and pasting seems such a natural concept to us old digital immigrants, and while the myth is that all things computer come naturally to little kids, that's truly just a myth. My 3rd graders, after a few sessions of work with it, do "get" it better than, for example, my mother-in-law [nods to Ann], but it has to be learned, ya'll--it's not breathing, it's a task! They practiced this task with Internet Explorer and Microsoft Word, copying and pasting both text and images. The benefit of pasting an image into Word before printing it is that it can then be easily resized by dragging handles from corners, yet another new skill. Here are a couple of the resulting projects, these from students in Ms. McKay's class!

Once the 3rd graders have mined all they need from the internet, they are returning to Type to Learn 3 for more practice home-row-keying! That will come in handy next month when we foray into computer programming with Scratch.

4th graders are venturing further into Quest Atlantis! The room is both exciting and filled with questions from the questers, and one thing I note is that the din is beginning to subside a bit as confusion yields to early understanding and wonder. NOTE TO PARENTS: If you can't get the software working at home, not to worry! We'll be questing at school for real and soon, pursuing an aspect of one of the 5 Social Commitments that underscore QA. Look for more soon! Meanwhile, here's a picture I snapped at the Ecology World Game Preserve, only one of the amazing wealth of experiences available in this virtual environment:
Kindergartners and 1st graders are designing Valentines with Drawing for Children. They are working from template, adding their name, and exploring the shift and Ctrl keys for modifying the effects of stamps and clipart hearts. Then we print! All the kids love to print; it must be the tactile attraction of paper and physical product, which shows no sign of going away, despite the digital world's offerings. Here are a couple of those, one from K and one from 1st!

2nd graders are working with basic, simple math operations at Funbrain.com's Math Arcade, easily accessible at the Free Choice Options category of the Webliographer. While there's no product to share from this activity, the hopeful expectation is that 2nd graders will become familiar enough with the interface to come and practice their math skills at this fun site, available anywhere, anytime with internet access. There are 22 games in the gameboard-style interface, and the problems can get more challenging depending on the grade level set at the beginning. After each game mastered, a code is issued so that a student can come right back in at that earned level the next time, no user registration required. We went in this week using the code "Cow2," which puts us at Math Basketball. Try it for yourself!

from http://www.funbrain.com/brain/MathBrain/MathBrain.html

We Warm Up in the Lab During the Coldest Week!

Wow, it's cold out there, but it's warm in the computer lab!

Third graders are practicing their copy and paste skills in Internet Explorer and Microsoft Word as they gather images to adorn their poster creations that will display their learning about their Master Artists. Check back here next week for example pictures! Along the way, they are reminded of the two-step procedure in case inappropriate images or websites greet their searches (1--close it, turn off the monitor if it won't close and 2--tell a grownup) and they are learning about how to resize images in Word, how to relocate a saved document on the network, and how to change the destination printer while printing. Lots of "collateral learning" going on!

Fourth graders continue their tentative explorations into the fun and exciting 3D online world, Quest Atlantis. The excitement in the lab is palpable as they gain control of their QA interface, begin to understand the culture of communication and helpfulness, and learn from early mistakes. I did receive my first (and hopefully last) email from a QA Chat Monitor that one of our students was "spamming," typing gibberish into the chat field repeatedly, and this provided us with a good teachable moment. The student account was not disabled, but should the behavior continue the next incident will lose him/her the privilege of participating in this community "play." The Quest Atlantis founders, by the way, have pursued significant research into the way students learn best, and their game design is solidly rooted in this research. See their philosophy and foundations at QuestAtlantis.org. While I've got you here, though, let me give you a taste of it:

It is generally accepted by educators that learners should participate in domain-related activities, not simply receive the results of someone else’s activities as summarized in tests or as heard in lectures. Underlying the development of QA learning tasks, QA unit plans, and the experience of Quest Atlantis more generally is a participatory framework that emphasizes action and reflection as central components to the learning process. This notion of an active learner engaged in real-world activities is central to the child-centered, experientially-focused, and inquiry-based learning environments promoted in academic research, and is consistent with current frameworks and plans for educational reform.

Kindergarten: It was soooo cold this week that I felt it necessary to take my kindergartners to the beach with Boowa and Kwala! They could practice their mouse and design skills by dressing Kwala up and then printing their masterpiece; they hone their visual skills by picking out pairs of parasols that match; they could work on hand-eye coordination by attaching a crab to their mouse and navigating down a sandy path (in 5 increasingly difficult levels); and they could play Frisbee catch with Boowa (hand-eye work again, but much more challenging than Mr. Crab!).

1st graders worked with a couple online "games" at the BBCKids website, including "Clockwise" and "Matching Time," two exercises geared to practicing concepts relating to time and timetelling. Again, the game design is incrementally levelled, from Level 1's "on the hour" questions to Level 3's "on the five-minutes" ones. We also discussed the meaning of "millenium" and "fortnight," two time-words we don't see so much over here in the New World. Nashville makes use of the latter concept in its "Fortnightly" social dance school, and I was pleased to see that some of our kids are already familiar with the term precisely because they attend their dance classes every two weeks!

2nd graders also forayed into math, visiting Funbrain.com for some rousing sessions of "Math Baseball," either on the "Easy" or the "Medium" levels. Easy is single digit, but it can be challenging as well if students try to see how many "runs" they can bat in how fast. My students' Easy level record as of this typing is 76 runs and more than one student has batted in more than 35 at the Medium (double digit) level. Using sites like Funbrain's Math Baseball, students can challenge themselves and differentiate their very own instruction. As I told my students, they are going to have to learn their math facts, and if they can be having fun while doing it, more's the better. After completing Math Baseball, they were able to visit the Funbrain Math Arcade, an interesting set of math games set up for delivery on a boardgame-like table. My favorite was the Pig Toss, I have to admit. In it, estimation and spatial skills are challenged as some of my hillbilly relatives jump as high as the user sets them to onto a seesaw with a pig at the other end, then the pig flies as far as the user sets it. It's estimate, revise, estimate revise, until the game is finally won and the next game can be played. It's none other than Math Basketball! Yay!

from http://funbrain.com